Notes on Ekphrasis

Creating poetry is more than just sitting down and writing “stuff” in a particular form. “Stuff” rarely materialises like manna, it must be found from somewhere.

Finding “stuff” to write about can be difficult. The notions of “writing what you know”, “write what you see around you” and “write from experience” are all good in principle, but when these sources seem exhausted, dry or repetitious and unchallenging, it can be useful to take a break and borrow material from somewhere else. I do not believe that everything should be written from direct experience and as a scientist, I would be peculiarly stunted if I started experimenting or theorising based only my own experience.

Other artists provide a useful source of material, usually “pre-sorted”. I suspect few artists create work from material they think unimportant, so looking at a piece of art gives an already considered source. I often chose paintings and photographs as a source, often for an exercise rather than with the deliberate intention to write a poem. Interestingly, I choose the work, I am not forced to a given work. I tend to approach this material in different ways, sometimes taking them at face value, sometimes with a more cynical eye. Sometimes my approach changes during the exercise.

The choice provides more than a source, it also provides constraints to the writing. The style of the source is often reflected in the writing style, for example, the impression of simplicity in Spencer’s “St Francis and the Birds” is reflected in the simple style of the resulting poem. Constraints may be subverted when the source acts as a catalyst to a wider ranging piece as in “So we all find the shore before sunset”, based on Turner’s allegorical “War.The Exile and the Rock Limpet”.

Although it is dangerous to mix sources, I find contrasting pieces, often in different genres, can provide a mid-ground that provides valuable thinking space. The poem “Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Édouard Manet, 1882″ was originally based not on the painting itself, but on Copolla’s film “Lost in Translation”. The painting provided the material, the film the constraints.

Sometimes it is not the image that provides the material, but the technique. My Marilyn poems are often based on photographs, but one in particular “The digital enhancement of photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio” is based not on the image, but the enhancement techniques.

Ekphrasis has moved on since the days where it just involved detailed description of other artists’ work and this progress makes it a valuable resource for writing. By providing already processed material it provides constraints but also different approaches for the writer and even new ways of thinking.

St Francis and the Birds - Notes

St Francis and the Birds is based on the painting of the same name to be found in the Tate collection. The painting is stylised and very Stanley Spencer'ish.

The feature I remember first noticing about the painting is the use of colour, which seems to get lost on the internet but often appears vibrant and challenging in print. I have tried to capture that light in the poem. As I looked more closely, the strangeness of the painting became more interesting to me. The saint appears more as a tramp or old man, dressed in slippers and a dressing gown, striding down a road and being followed not by disciples or monks, but by a variety of birds, who do not seem in the least bit disturbed by him. This is in striking contrast to the remaining people, a boy and a woman, who both seem very disturbed indeed.

To further add to my fascination, the painting of the hands is odd. They seem to take an important place in the painting, hanging down from the boy and bent out of position, or grasping and shielding the eyes of the woman, or flat palmed and on the ends of arms in an exagerated marching action in the case of the saint.

The final aspect that I have tried to grasp is the sensation of space and time. Space and time, for me, is very important in a poem, fixing it into a four dimensional location, and this time the location came from research. (Strangely enough, I once walked through Cookham on one of the hottest summer days I can remember, totally ignorant of the Spencer connection.) The other aspect to the location is the clearly defined pantiled house and tree in the background which, I have read, places the saint between Fernlea and The Nest in Cookham. I have not been back yet, but I hope to check this one day.

Writing the poem was a quick affair, and this shows. It is not a highly polished work, and tries to reflect some of that carefully crafted innocence that Spenser shows in his later work. It works using some simple techniques - the seperation of concepts into stanzas and the seperation of ideas into lines. The stanzas reflect location and the birds, location and the people and finally location and the spiritual (if I may use such an abstract word).

The seperation of ideas can be illustrated in stanza 2 for example. Location and location show in lines 10 and 11, fixing the location in space and providing two poles which will be reflected in later lines. The action of the principal in line 12 and apparel in line 13 pivots the poem around St Francis. Lines 14 and 15 reflect the location defined in lines 10 and 11, but also fix two more poles in place, male and female, youth and adult. The stanza finishes with a symbolic gesture and a pun in line 16, an action in line 17 and an object in line 18.

Why start with a location in this stanza? Because the previous stanza ends with a movement to that precise location with the description of the pantiles. I also liked the assonance in Fan-tail and Fernlea. Why introduce the flowers in line 18? It draws attention to the hands, the major symbol in the next stanza.

There are many other features to look out for in this poem, but many of them fell out naturally rather than being inserted or sculpted into place. The painting speaks for itself, and that's what the poem should do. Simple language, simple description but great meaning.

St Francis and the Birds

Stanley Spencer

Cookham
1935
The birds look skyward
To the coming Messiah.
The chickens chatter,
Geese gaze,
Fan-tail pigeons
Congregate
On the pantiles.

Between ‘Fernlea’
And ‘The Nest’
Strides the saint
In dressing-gown habit.
Boy ahead.
Woman behind,
Eyes shielded from the divine sun
By an upraised arm
And daisy bouquet.

And the hands.
The hands turned
Both to the Son
And to the birds.
The pantiles gleam
On this summer day.
The slippered saint reaches,
On tip-toe,
To his Maker.

© Martin Porter 1998

St Francis and the Birds is based on a painting by Stanley Spencer held in the Tate gallery. The painting is, simply put, superb and was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1935. I have tried to keep the poem simple to reflect Spencer's style.

Place, Maps, Language

A map is its own language. Unspoken, it still manages to describe place, location and even scenery, often with an astonishing simplicity, but sometimes with a subtlety that can be quite breathtaking. A bright red line that illustrates a tarmac road, or a thin blue line meandering through a green background may describe a stream percolating through peaty watermeadows. Interestingly, a map with its two dimensional syntax has a sophistication that is denied writing along one dimensional lines. It is here that poetry often challenges the dimensional boundary with precise placement of words on a page. Just as I might spend considerable time appreciating the structure of a poem, so I have spent hours in front of a hostel fire with a pot of tea reading a map to discover its secrets.

1:25000 attempts to capture the mystery of map reading. It starts with a relatively ordinary line structure, with the usual vocabulary and punctuation, but as it explores the landscape it drifts away from a simple syntax towards a looser style that relies on placement, symmetry and wonderment.

1:25000

Only slightly lost, we find the paper
Folded in an inside pocket. We are there,
Somewhere, one to twenty-five thousand,
A mote of mobile imagining.

And a trickle of blue splits the landscape.

In the orange skein
We untangle a rolling surface pressed
Flat on the map, but filled with pebble,
Outcrop, blades of grass.
On close scrutiny of the stylised code
A shrubby plantation catches the eye
With its little lollipop trees
Springing from the rough green hummocks
Of a rough green pasture.

And a trickle of blue splits the paper.

On the ground
We find no deep black names.
No red carpets are laid on our tracks.
Hidden from the ink are the implicit sheep,
The thin, abstracted cry of a curlew’s mate,
The wide airy volume of the space
The loneliness
The unprintable emptiness of being there

© Martin Porter 1999

Shell is a piece written to explore the difference between the mechanisms (the map, the googling and the met report) we use to describe the world and the world itself. In some ways it shares the same properties as 1:25000, with a growing disorder in the punctuation, but in "shell" the contrast between the virtual and the visceral is further examined by the use of upper case characters. The only "reality" in the poem is the Single Fragment of Shell, all the other references are just exactly that, someone elses experiences referred forward.

shell

her father unfolded the concertina
map, laying it in dunes on the table
she googled it, name in box, click
of a button, eyes on the screen
and zoomed in to see

every grain of sand,
a hermit crab caught, mid-
scuttle,

the met report told them it was
comfortable yesterday
comfortable today and
it will be…

i gently rest my finger on the sand,
raise it to my face, observe
the Single Fragment of Shell adhered
and rub it, abrasively, across my open palm

© Martin Porter 2010

As an aside, but nevertheless important to note, is the play with the written language in 1:25000. I do not know how you read that particular string of characters, but the one to twenty-five thousand in the body of the poem probably reads the same, although the string of characters is very different.

1:25000 won 2nd prize in the Jersey Evening Post writing competition 1999
shell was published in the 52/250 blog  18 March 2011